1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to display control apparatuses and storage mediums, and more particularly to a display control apparatus which displays an image downloaded from a server and to a computer-readable storage medium which stores a program for causing a computer to display a downloaded image.
The use of the World Wide Web (WWW) has become very popular, and there are increasing number of operating business systems which carry out various kinds of business processes by use of a WWW browser to download and display an image from a WWW server.
In such an environment, there are demands to realize a large-scale business system including several hundred to several thousand clients, that is, WWW browsers, wherein the system maintenance can be made from the WWW server. In other words, there are demands to manage such a large-scale business system by the WWW server, to quickly display a large number of images moving on the WWW browsers of the clients, and to exchange data among the displayed images at the clients.
2. Description of the Related Art
According to the conventional system, a plurality of images, such as pages of pictures, menus and messages, are stored in the WWW server. The stored images are successively downloaded from the WWW server and successively displayed on the WWW browser of the client. The client carries out various business processes by interacting with the displayed images.
However, in order for the client to successively download and display the images from the WWW server, it is necessary to carry out the following series of processes which are troublesome and time-consuming. In other words, an image which is written in the form of a HTML document and stored in the WWW server is downloaded by the WWW browser of the client, and the downloaded HTML document is analyzed and displayed on a display unit of the client. Then, based on the image which is presently being displayed, a HTML document corresponding to the next image is downloaded from the WWW server, analyzed and displayed on the display unit of the client. Such an operation is repeated for all of the images to be downloaded from the WWW server.
For this reason, it takes time to download the HTML document and to analyze and display the HTML document each time, thereby making it difficult to carry out a series of business processes by quickly downloading the images and quickly switching the images which are displayed.